ISU students' Social Security numbers compromised by hackers

Tuesday, April 22, 2014 3:33 PM

Iowa State University has discovered that some students' Social Security numbers may have been compromised in a breach that affected five departmental servers on campus. The breach compromised the information of 29,780 students who were enrolled in the university between 1995 and 2012. There is no evidence that any data files were accessed, and there was no student financial information in the records, the university said in a news release. The servers were hacked by someone who intended to generate enough computing power to create the digital currency Bitcoins. The university does not know who the hacker or hackers were. "We don't believe our students' personal information was a target in this incident, but it was exposed," said Jonathan Wickert, senior vice president and provost, in a news release.